Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Anyone teaching with the new Common Core Standards needs to check out this blog Kindergarten Kindergarten. I tried to use some of her problem solving activities with my students last year with fantastic results. The kids made these on their own during free play after this lesson.

Monday, July 30, 2012

So usually I post funny things the kids say to me, but I stumbled on this gem while cleaning through photos. I remember this day. Once of my students kept going over to his cubby every couple of minutes while doing his morning work. Finally i went over to see what he was doing and this is what I found.

Friday, July 27, 2012

You'll notice it looks a little funky in the middle. I had a sub for a couple of days and I had trouble getting things to line up after that for a while. This is something that I will be doing again because the kids loved it.

We wrote 100 words. This was a good time filler for those early finishers. Many worked on and off throughout the day.

We found kisses hidden in the room and matched the numbers on the bottom to a hundreds chart. (Got this idea from mailbox magazine)

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Fun idea for Earth Day. We always have a playground clean up complete with gloves because there are some yucky things they always manage to find. Then we do this craft. I will usually just use pieces of litter from our classroom so its not dirty :)

Monday, July 23, 2012

Here is an science and art lesson. One of our science units is about states of matter and we mostly talk about solids, liquids, and gases. In order to help students experience air I plopped down some paints and let them go to town and blow as hard as they could. I gave them very little instruction beyond blow the paint and keep it on the paper. Some of them really got into mixing the colors and it brought up such wonderful discussions.

A few tips.

Make sure your paint is watery so it will move around, but not too watery because then it will run off the page on onto your tables and floor...not that I would know anything about that. :)

Also try to get those little straws like they have a lunch for their milk. The thinner the straw the harder it is to blow. This is good because you want them to have to work at it.

Another handy tip I have is for how to dry painted paper. Since I have a limited amount of space I take a Styrofoam tray (I just used ones from the lunch room that the kids were done with) and cut paper to fit inside.

Depending on what you are doing you can have the kids paint with the paper already in the tray or place it in when they are done.

It's been hard for me to post here lately and read anything kindergarten related because I just needed a break from school. I left my job of six years, which was a lot harder then I thought it would be. I need to be working closer to home and so right now I'm in between jobs.

It's been very nerve wracking because the county I want to work on has posted ZERO jobs in elementary ed for the past two months. I know this because I have been checking every day (multiple times) I know it is partly due to the fact that they are still going through transfers and all that jazz, but waiting is hard. It's hard to go through Target and see the sale on glue sticks and not buy any.

But anyway, I've been keeping myself busy at home cleaning out some areas of my house that desperately needed it and I was cleaning up my computer and found some pictures of things that I did over the spring with my students.

This is from Valentine's Day, but you could do this project anytime. Last year our art teacher, who we only see 3 times a year :( , did this more free form with the kids. I adapted it for hearts for a valentine measuring project, but you could really do any shape you wanted to.

1. Collect different sized bubble wrap (large bubbles, small bubbles, etc.) and cut them down to individual pieces for the kids. Roughly the size of a piece of 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Tape the bubble wrap to the table.

2. Have the students paint the bubble wrap and then make a print. I let them switch for different colors and different sized bubbles.

3. Let the paper dry and then have them trace their shape on the back. Then they can cut it out their shape. I purposely gave students different sized hearts since this was going to be a measuring activity. (Look its differentiated!)

4. I had my students measure with nonstandard units. I ended up putting these on the bulletin board put I have no pictures of that. They glued them to a sentence frame that said "I used _____ cubes to measure my heart." Some of my more advanced students got to pick their unit of measurement so their frame looked like this " I used ____ _______ to measure my heart."

Thinking back now you could do this with a shapes unit so you could review 2D shapes (K.G.2) and have them use a paper big enough that they could trace two object and then compare (K.MD.2).